[NoInfo]

I have been banging my head on this question for about a week. I have lenovo NVidia ion nettop that I installed Ubuntu server and the latest version of Kodi so I am not running the full Ubuntu desktop. I am using HDMI audio out to a splitter. It feeds my 5.1 Surround receiver in my media room and a LCD TV in a different room. I was thinking that if I have it configured to just pass the audio through HDMI then my receiver and TV would just decode it. I have followed the directions here "http://kodi.wiki/view/PulseAudio" to set it up as pass-through. If I have it selected as digital stereo then in my media room I have no rear channel (comes out front speakers) but the TV works fine. If I configure it for digital 5.1 then media room works perfectly but I get no sound on my TV. Obviously if I try to remap my channels then nothing comes out the TV. Ideas?

[muncrief]

While trying to fix the HDMI problems with Kodi on the Fire TV Stick I finally figured it out on Ubuntu. I'm running 14.04 and here's how to get passthrough to work.

First of all I discovered that the problem is not with Kodi, it's with Pulse Audio. When I installed Ubuntu I discovered that HDMI passthrough didn't work with any video or audio player. To make a long story short, I spent many days trying everything I could find on the Internet, and my own knowledge of engineering, to get Pulse Audio to work. The bottom line is that for some things, no matter how you configure deamon.conf etc. Pulse Audio is just not going to let you have HDMI passthrough. However, Pulse Audio is an integral part of Ubuntu and many other distros so uninstalling it, while possible, is not very practical. So finally I created three small scripts that disable pulse audio when you launch Kodi, and re-enable it when Kodi exits. The scripts are named pulseaudio_stop and pulseaudio_start to start/stop Pulse Audio, and kodi_launch to launch Kodi. Here they are:

pulseaudio_stop
----------------------
#! /bin/bash

echo autospawn = no > $HOME/.config/pulse/client.conf
pulseaudio --kill > /dev/null 2>&1

pulseaudio_start
----------------------
#! /bin/bash

rm $HOME/.config/pulse/client.conf > /dev/null 2>&1
pulseaudio --start > /dev/null 2>&1

kodi_launch
----------------
#! /bin/bash

pulseaudio_stop
kodi
pulseaudio_start


Just create the three scripts, make them executable (with chmod a+x script_name) and copy them to /usr/local/bin. Then replace the command in your Kodi launcher with kodi_launch. After the first launch go to the Kodi passthrough options and you will see a brand new HDMI device (mine was called HD-Audio Generic, GSM LG TV on HDMI #0). Just set this as your passthrough device and like magic you will have HDMI passthrough!

As you can see, the problem was that Pulse Audio was hiding this HDMI input from everyone and everything. Even if I used aplay -l or aplay -L to discover it, it would never work, even when directly addressing it with CARD, DEV, hw, and plughw. I'm still looking for a way to get HDMI working without disabling Pulse Audio, but for now this is the best I can do. I need to get Kodi HDMI passthrough working on the Fire TV Stick so disabling PA is probably not an option.

I hope this helps!

[NoInfo]

Thank you so much for the reply. Since this is just a media PC and will only run Kodi I can purge pulseaudio from my system. What do you use for audio now?

[muncrief]

I'm using an LG 47LM4600 TV with an HDMI input with optical out that goes to a Yamaha HTR-5760 stereo. By the way, the LG TV won't do AC3 passthrough by default, I had to buy an Android app for my phone called LGMS2 to get into the LG service menu and change the optical out from PCM to AC3.

The thing that launched me on this quest was that I was trying to get all my media devices to go through the TV to the stereo so I didn't always have to switch stereo inputs. I bought a Fire TV Stick so I could watch Netflix and sideload Kodi on it and was really irritated when Kodi passthrough mode didn't work. I even compiled my own versions of Kodi (on a virtual machine under Windows) trying to figure things out. When that proved improbable I installed Ubuntu 14.04 to do more research and was surprised when HDMI passthrough didn't work on it either. In fact both the Fire TV Stick and Ubuntu failed in the same way. Each of them would output a scratchy sounding "chirp" when I tried to use passthrough, and then simply output stereo. It took a while to figure out that it was Pulse Audio screwing things up, but now that I know I'm determined to find out why, and make Kodi do passthrough on the Fire TV Stick.

[RazzMcTazz]

Muncrief: Would you please tell me how you enabled 5.1 passthrough on your LG 47LM4600 TV? I downloaded an IR remote app for my Galaxy S5 (Anymote Universal Remote) that lets me get into the TV's EZ-Adjust menu or the In-start Menu but I can't figure out which menu item to change.